How about the weather?

Something I was not prepared for was the Swedish weather.

More specifically, how the weather can have so much influence on people’s lives.

When I was a child, I never quite understood why my teachers put so much effort into explaining that the closer a place is to the Equator, the less different are the seasons of the year. Or why so many people write about the weather in so many books, poetry, songs…

I was born and raised in Rio Grande do Sul, a state in the south of Brazil. I heard since a very early age that the region where I was living is one of the few on my (huge) country that had four different seasons, and I saw pictures in books that showed flowers on spring, beaches on summer, yellow leaves on the ground on autumn and naked trees and snow on the winter. But I’ve never seen snow there.

From what I saw there, spring is time for sneezing all the time. The weather is usually starting to get better and warmer and, to be honest, I’ve never noticed when the flowers start to grow. Summer is when it’s insanely hot and it is quite popular for people to go to the beach. Spring and summer are also the time when people start going to the university in the afternoon to talk, drink chimarrão (which is a special kind of tea that you should google to know more about), and maybe watch a concert or something like that, because it only gets dark around 9 pm.

Autumn is never time for the leaves to fall. Maybe some do, but most of them stay on their places, in the trees. Slowly, it starts to get cold. It’s time to put all the blankets in the sun for them to get rid of the storage smell. For me, it’s also time to give up on some things that I enjoy because of the cold or the dark, or sometimes regret the things that I didn’t give up on, for the very same reasons.

And then, there is the winter. In most cities, there is no snow, but the ground can get frozen sometimes. It can be around 0º Celcius quite often, but the houses have no heating system, so we don’t get to leave our jackets when we get in, and it’s specially hard to leave our beds in the morning, because it’s so cold to wake up. Plus the sun isn’t up until 7:30 am.

It was the end of february when we arrived Sweden. It was the end of the winter, and everything was white. When we landed in Arlanda, the birds were comming back, and we never saw so many birds in the air. I walked and played in the snow in Sigtuna, Uppsala, and Vislanda after that. I saw the snow melt and the white and blue flowers start to grow, but most importantly: I heard people saying they were growing.

It took me some time to understand that in Deceber there is only sun from 9 am to 3 pm.

Everything is white, and for the nature, life is on hold.

Just getting out of the houses in the winter takes so much effort that the weather actually makes people feel different things.

After all of that, seeing a green spot on a gray bush is a good reason to be happy.

It’s cold here today, but the people are warmer.

 by Débora Grenzel, Brazilian participant of 2016’s exchange